2020年下半年大学英语四级长篇阅读3篇

2020年下半年大学英语四级长篇阅读3篇

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【篇一】2020年下半年大学英语四级长篇阅读

Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived.

You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the questions by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2.

A University Degree No Longer Confers Financial Security

lions of school-leavers in the rich world are about to bid a tearful goodbye to their parents and start a new life at university. Some are inspired by a pure love of learning. But most also believe that spending three or four years at university--and accumulating huge debts in the process--will boost their chances of landing a well-paid and secure job.

B.Their elders have always told them that education is the best way to equip themselves to thrive in a globalised world. Blue-collar workers will see their jobs outsourced and automated, the familiar argument goes. School dropouts will have to cope with a life of cash-strapped (资金紧张的) insecurity. But the graduate elite will have the world at its feet. There is some evidence to support this view. A recent study from Georgetown University's Centre on Education and the Workforce argues that"obtaining a post-secondary credential ( 证书) is almost always worth it." Educational qualifications are tightly correlated with earnings: an American with a professional degree can expect to pocket $3.6m over a lifetime; one with merely a high- school diploma can expect only $1.3m. The gap between more- and less-educated earners may be widening. A study in 2020 found that someone with a bachelor's degree could expect to earn 75% more over a lifetime than someone with only a high-school diploma. Today the disparity is even greater.

C.But is the past a reliable guide to the future? Or are we at the beginning of a new phase in

the relationship between jobs and education? There are good reasons for thinking that old patterns are about to change--and that the current recession-driven downturn (衰退) in the demand for Western graduates will morph (改变) into something structural. The strong wind of creative destruction that has shaken so many blue-collar workers over the past few decades is beginning to shake the cognitive elite as well.

D.The supply of university graduates is increasing rapidly. The Chronicle of Higher Education calculates that between 1990 and 2020 the number of students going to university increased by 22% in North America, 74% in Europe, 144% in Latin America and 203% in Asia. In 2020 150m people attended university around the world, including 70m in Asia. Emerging economies―specially China--are pouring resources into building universities that can compete with the elite of America and Europe. They are also producing professional- services firms snch as Tata Consulting Services and Infosys that take fresh graduates and turn them into world-class computer programmers and consultants. The best and the brightest of the rich world must increasingly compete with the best and the brightest from poorer countries who are willing to work harder for less money.

E. At the same time, the demand for educated labor is being reconfigured (重新配置) by technology, in much the same way that the demand for agricultural labor was reconfigured in the 19th century and that for factory labor in the 20th. Computers can not only perform repetitive mental tasks much faster than human beings. They can also empower amateurs to do what professionals once did: why hire a flesh-and-blood accountant to complete your tax return when Turbotax (a software package ) will do the job at a fraction of the cost? And the variety of jobs that computers can do is multiplying as programmers teach them to deal with tone and linguistic ambiguity.

F.Several economists, including Paul Krugman, have begun to argue that post-industrial societies will be characterized not by a relentless rise in demand for the educated but by a great "hollowing out", as mid-level jobs are destroyed by smart machines and high-level job growth slows. David Autor, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), points out that the main effect of automation in the computer era is not that it destroys blue-collar jobs but that it destroys